Students for an Orwellian Student Senate Slate

The Students for an Orwellian Student Senate Slate was a slate for ASUCDSenate in Fall 2004. They adopted a platform of half serious ideas and half mocking ideas — making fun of existing slates, national politics, Governor Schwarzenegger, or themselves. Most of the slate were Innerparty of Students for an Orwellian Society.

Though they did not get endorsed by the California Aggie during their first run, Official Candidate Leathers and Official Candidate Van Schoelandt were both endorsed by the Aggie in their Winter 2004 Campaign as an Independent and an "Urger", respectively. It seems even the Aggie believes in Ingsoc nowadays.

The slate recommended voting in the following order, in an attempt to maximize the Choice Voting system and to give the impression that Big Brother was telling you how to vote:

Because of their over-the-top style of bold claims and accusations, the statements published in the California Aggie were edited by the Elections Committee in what has become known as the Election Statement Controversy. However, the Campus Judicial Board unanimously sided with the Orwellians, who then moved on to creating a massive ASUCD Elections Reform bill. A year and many elections bills later, the entire slate of candidates (excluding Twiggie, who graduated), is now on the Elections Committee, and only one of the previous year's members have returned.

SOSSS also directly spawned the Friends Urging Campus Kindness, which did indeed win two seats (out of eight) in the Winter 2004 election. It seems that fortune has finally smiled on SOSSS.

Campaign Issues

They had planned to change the name of the Death Star to be officially called the Death Star and Kleiber Hall to Keebler Hall since that is what many students call it anyway. They wanted to paint a GIANT elf on the side of Keebler Hall and possibly get doubleplusmoney from the cookie people.

You would probably have to pay George Lucas to use the name "Death Star" officially. - KenjiYamada

It actually sounds like free publicity for the franchise to me. - BrentLaabs

Lucas is hardly the only person using the term "Death Star". Put an AT&T logo on it and get AT&T to pay (bonus because it resembles the Lucas Death Star, thus the nickname). If that's too edgy/commercial/legally questional, just go with "We're naming it after the excellent and educational Nova Episode". — jw

On a more serious note, the IRS is coming after UCD (no thanks to the idiots that broke the law in our name) so we would like to cut unnecessary things (i.e. $5000 for a fire truck to shoot tube socks at people, trip to mountains for senate members,etc.) and at the same time show support for groups on campus that help the community.

If elected to Senate, the slate promised to donate half of our senate paycheck to local charities/clubs/whatever that need the money.

In Fall of 2004, none of the candidates were elected, though #1 candidate Jonathon Leathers was only eliminated in the last round, short 42 votes. The Orwellian slate takes this as a mandate for change, despite the fact that they actually lost. They received so many votes without getting caught cheatng that they have said, "We have political capital, and we intend to spend it." Another acheivement is that Chad Van Schoelandt received more #20 votes than any other candidate. They are planning on running in the next election.

Discussion

It looks like the SOSSS fliers that advocated voting 1. Jonathon Leathers 2. Chad Van Schoelandt 3. Marie Huynh 4. Christopher Rood weren't such a great idea, as they resulted in the latter three getting so few first-choice votes that they were eliminated in the first two rounds. STV is known to reward candidates with stronger core support (read: first-choice votes). A strategy you might try next quarter is something like "If your birthday is between such and such a date, vote in this order, etc." Of course, if you spaced each of the 24 possible orders equally across the calendar year, you risk the possibility that SOSSS's support will be so diluted that none of the candidates will be elected. So play around with it a bit and strike a balance.

And remember that especially for few-winner elections like this, STV isn't especially proportional... about 1/7 of the votes will be "wasted" (N.B. this figure is only true for our specific elections, with six seat using Droop quota) . This can even happen in larger parliaments; in the 1998 Northern Ireland elections, UUP won more seats than SDLP, despite getting less of the vote. - RaghavKrishnapriyan

You are a fool if you think that we didn't do any research on this. The point of the slate was not to get all of us in. We were trying to get the most qualified of us in by concentrating the votes on one person. The rest of us were merely support. In fact, we told people NOT to vote for the rest of us as #1 but some did so anyway. Things went more or less according to plan and Jonathan was the last person to be eliminated. Sure, we ended up not getting anyone in. But what do you expect when other people cheat? - MarieHuynh

Well, it's an interesting problem, anyway (though I'm not sure what you mean by "support"). It would probably work better if we had "above-the-line voting", as Australian Senate elections do. 95% of Australian voters vote above the line, after all. Are you going to be running anyone for President? - RaghavKrishnapriyan

Okay, and the ballot data is available now (thank you, Greens) and even if we eliminated the candidates accused of campaigning (Haag, Malik and Ruel) their replacements would be Manteghi, Prodigalidad and Chin (Leathers is still eliminated in the last round). I heard that Malik told students to vote for anyone in a yellow shirt though, which would taint the rest of the election results. Sucks. :-/ -RaghavKrishnapriyan

But it should be noted that there was a fourth accused Focus member: Derrick Prodigalidad. When the results were run with the current four accused removed, it gave the 3 seats to Manteghi, Chin, and Leathers from SOSSS. - RevChad